Michigan Votes Down Affirmative Action

Submitted by Scott Jaschik on November 8, 2006 - 4:00am

Michigan voters on Tuesday approved a ban on affirmative action at the state's public colleges and in government contracting. The vote came despite opposition to the ban from most academic and business leaders in the state -- and the history in which the University of Michigan played a key role in preserving the right of colleges to consider race as a factor in admissions.

Defenders of affirmative action had been encouraged in the campaign's closing days by polls suggesting growing skepticism for the ban. But in the end, the ban won support from more than 58 percent of voters, according to unofficial results. Michigan thus followed a pattern in which some voters appear reluctant to tell pollsters of their opposition to affirmative action.

A CNN exit poll[1] of Michigan voters suggested that the ban passed because of support from men. Sixty percent of men, but only 47 percent of women said that they backed the ban. By educational status, support for the ban was strongest among those who were college graduates, and opposition was strongest among those with postgraduate education. Among white voters, CNN found that 59 percent backed the ban, while only 14 percent of black voters did so.

The impact of the ban -- known as the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative[2] -- is expected to be greatest at the University of Michigan, which has the most competitive admissions in the state. It is unclear how Michigan will respond to the change, which would take effect in the middle of an admissions cycle.

Mary Sue Coleman, president of the university issued the following statement Tuesday night -- before final results were in: "We defended affirmative action all the way to the Supreme Court because diversity is essential to our mission as educators. We must keep the doors of opportunity open to all. Regardless of what happens with Proposal 2, the University of Michigan will remain fully and completely committed to diversity. I am determined to do whatever it takes to sustain our excellence by recruiting and retaining a diverse community of students, faculty and staff."

Coleman plans to meet with students today to discuss the vote.

Donn M. Fresard, editor in chief of The Michigan Daily, which opposed the ban,[3] said he didn't expect major student unrest over the vote. "You are not going to see rioting on the Diag," he said. "The average students isn't overly upset about this, and you'd be surprised how many students support it. Especially among white students, support was pretty high."

The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative was the brainchild of Ward Connerly, who as a regent of the University of California led that system and then the state to bar affirmative action, with statewide action coming in 1996 vote. A similar vote two years later banned affirmative action in Washington State, but efforts by affirmative action foes then shifted largely to the courts, leading to the landmark 2003 Supreme Court decisions in two cases involving the University of Michigan.

Those decisions -- one about the system used by Michigan to admit undergraduates[4] and one about the system used by its law school[5] -- effectively said that colleges could continue to use affirmative action, but couldn’t have separate systems in which extra points were awarded across the board specifically for race and ethnicity. Many critics of affirmative action had high hopes that the Michigan cases would be used by the Supreme Court to roll back its 1978 ruling in the Bakke case,[6] which upheld the right of colleges to consider race in admissions. When Bakke largely survived, Connerly and others shifted back to the referendum approach, with a focus on Michigan.

The effort in Michigan was controversial throughout the process. Defenders of affirmative action said that those who gathered petitions on behalf of the measure deceived citizens, leading many to sign the petitions without realizing what they were supporting. When Michigan courts said that the petitions were valid, the stage was set for the campaign that ended on Tuesday.

Affirmative action was not the only controversial social issue on the ballots Tuesday. In Missouri, voters were deciding on a measure to bar state and local governments from banning stem-cell research that is legal under federal law. While some news operations were still reporting the measure too close to call this morning, the Associated Press reported that the measure -- which is supportive of scientists' right to do research -- had narrowly passed.[10]

Eight states on Tuesday considered proposals to restrict marriage to male-female couples. For public colleges and universities, the measures have raised fears that they would not be able to offer domestic partnership benefits to gay employees for their partners. Many of the marriage proposals ban not only marriage but benefits that are similar to marriage. Where states in the past have passed such measures, challenges to domestic partner benefits have followed.[11]

In the states for which results were available as of midnight, bans on gay marriage were comfortably ahead in South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin. Academic leaders in Wisconsin have been particularly concerned about the anti-gay-marriage measure. State law currently bars the University of Wisconsin from offering domestic partner benefits although the Board of Regents wants to do so. The University of Wisconsin at Madison is the only member of the Big 10 that doesn’t offer domestic partnership benefits, and some professors have indicated that they would consider leaving for other institutions if the state locked in its policy against offering domestic partner benefits.

The Board of Regents had adopted a resolution[12] opposing the gay marriage ban.